Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England

By David Zaret

This innovative work of historical sociology locates the origins of modern democratic discourse in the emergent culture of printing in early modern England. For David Zaret, the key to the rise of a democratic public sphere was the impact of this culture of printing on the secrecy and privilege that shrouded political decisions in seventeenth-century England. Zaret explores the unanticipated liberating effects of printing and printed communication in transforming the world of political secrecy into a culture of open discourse and eventually a politics of public opinion.


Contrary to those who locate the origins of the public sphere in the philosophical tracts of the French Enlightenment, Zaret claims that it originated as a practical accomplishment, propelled by economic and technical aspects of printing--in particular heightened commercialism and increased capacity to produce texts. Zaret writes that this accomplishment gained impetus when competing elites--Royalists and Parliamentarians, Presbyterians and Independents--used printed material to reach the masses, whose leaders in turn invoked the authority of public opinion to lobby those elites.


Zaret further shows how the earlier traditions of communication in England, from ballads and broadsides to inn and alehouse conversation, merged with the new culture of print to upset prevailing norms of secrecy and privilege. He points as well to the paradox for today's critics, who attribute the impoverishment of the public sphere to the very technological and economic forces that brought about the means of democratic discourse in the first place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691222592

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

P

UBLIC OPINION

is a central yet elusive aspect of democracy that several generations of scholars have explored as they pursued different questions about the cultural moorings of democratic governance. Three decades ago, when research on democracy examined prospects for new nations carved from colonies in Africa and Latin America, a key issue was the relationship between democracy’s institutional arrangements and supportive cultural developments in the rise of civic culture, psychological modernity, and value generalization.¹ Globalization and the demise of state socialism have renewed scholarly interest in these issues, although different concepts guide current research on democracy’s communicative foundations. One line of work revives the eighteenth-century idea of civil society²–a societal community whose axial principle of solidarity demarcates it from political and economic realms based on power and money. Studies of civil society emphasize the centrality of public opinion in politics because opinion is held to be the principal link between the democratic state and civil society. So does research on the public sphere,³ whose current status and future prospects are topics of lively, cross-disciplinary debates among social scientists and philosophers.

Although widespread agreement exists over the importance of public opinion for democratic governance, our understanding of its origins as a factor in politics is shrouded in confusion and controversy. In chapter 2 I survey widespread disagreement over every conceivable aspect of the early public sphere: the date of its appearance, the social background of its participants, and the extent to which exclusionary practices contradicted universalistic ideals of inclusion and open debate. Divergent ideological commitments are one source of disagreement over these issues. Radical critics of liberal democracy trace the origins of the public sphere to imperatives of capitalist development. Proponents of liberal democracy are more likely to cite structural differentiation and Protestant religion, while feminists point to patriarchal assumptions among capitalist men. These accounts of origins are not infrequently a foil for politically charged claims on the current and future prospects of the public sphere.

Another source of disagreement is methodological in nature. Writings by philosophers and social scientists on the public sphere highlight the intellectual tendencies of the hedgehog, who, unlike the fox that knows many things, seeks answers in discovering one big secret. The hedgehog’s predilection for overly broad generalization appears in scholarly accounts whose big secret is that the early public sphere was an accretion of the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the Enlightenment, patriarchy, Protestantism, modernity, or some other grand category. Hedgehog approaches underwrite disagreement, already sufficiently fueled by ideology, because they promote an excessively speculative mode of analysis. Its practitioners, in undergraduate parlance, follow a laid-back version of the sociology of knowledge that cites affinities or parallels between epochal events, categories, or trends (e.g., capitalism, Protestantism, differentiation) and any of the many attributes of the concept of a public sphere—between, for example, economic competition and a marketplace of ideas or the sanctity of conscience and free speech. Though communicative issues—for example, modes of textual reproduction, rhetorical conventions, distribution and reception—are central to any concept of the public sphere, little empirical work on these issues guides research on the early public sphere. And when the public sphere is analyzed in isolation from these communicative issues, it becomes an extremely elastic concept, and our knowledge of its origins flows more from speculation on the relevance of epochal trends and events than from empirical study of what, after all, is the ultimate dependent variable in this line of inquiry.

Yet empirical referents exist for the concept of a public sphere and its history. They appear when inquiry into the communicative origins of democracy descends from the higher regions of culture and ceases to explore writings by Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, and other luminaries of the Enlightenment as indicators of communicative practices that constitute the modern public sphere. If we want empirical evidence on the early public sphere, we must attend to communicative practices by a larger group of speakers, writers, printers, petitioners, publishers, and readers. We must study how individuals talked, argued, sang, wrote, read, and petitioned about public issues, and how this changed, not only in salons and universities, but in alehouses, shops, and churchyards. For this, the way has been cleared by historians who in recent years have explored many communicative issues pertaining to media, rhetoric, and reception.⁴ These issues have been pursued in historical studies of printing, news, and politics in early-modern France and colonial America,⁵ as well as in England.⁶ References to media, rhetoric, and reception routinely appear in sociological studies of the modern public sphere,⁷ but in accounts of the early public sphere they vanish behind interpretations of formal writings by Enlightenment philosophers and Protestant theologians. Use of these sources unites an otherwise heterogeneous collection of studies that is riddled with disagreement over key issues pertaining to the development of a public space in which appeals to opinion become central to politics.⁸ These disagreements are inevitable principally because relying on texts from the summit of high culture as evidence for studying the birth of public opinion is like looking the wrong way through a telescope—the withering criticism advanced long ago by Peter Laslett against novels as a source of data for social history. The indirect path, reading philosophers and theologians, might be justified if no better sources existed for political communication among ordinary persons in the past. Yet such evidence exists, more or less abundantly, for many different types of political communication.

Far more is concealed than revealed by studies of the early public sphere that overlook direct evidence on political communication and, instead, rely on philosophical and theological texts. In chapter 2 we shall see that this has led many scholars to associate the early public sphere with elite, eighteenth-century developments, most notably the rise of bourgeois society, leavened by the Enlightenment as the prototype for open, critical debate on public issues in civil society.⁹ But the invention of public opinion as a political force occurred well before the Enlightenment, in a more popular social milieu, a consequence not of theoretical principles but of practical developments that flowed from the impact of printing on traditional forms of political communication.¹⁰ The rationality and normative authority of public opinion appeared in English politics, unevenly to be sure, long before they were celebrated in writings by Enlightenment philosophers. During the English Revolution (1640–60) these practical developments led to precisely those democratic tenets—for example, the importance of consent, open debate, and reason for the authority of opinion in politics—that current scholarship describes as intellectual discoveries of the Enlightenment. Hence, empirical knowledge of the origins of our democratic culture will not be advanced by interpretations of philosophic or theological texts in order to establish the Enlightenment or Protestant religion as a prototype of the democratic public sphere.

When developed empirically, research on the origins of the public sphere confronts the following questions. When and why did political communication cease to be governed by norms of secrecy and privilege? How did invocation of public opinion become a central feature of political discourse? In pursuing these questions, my goal is not simply to attack hedgehogs. The point is not to discredit theoretical reflection on the origins of democratic culture, but to sharpen it, to bring it into closer proximity to contemporary historical scholarship. Toward this end, English history is the model case for studying developments in political communication that eventuate in the birth of the public sphere.¹¹ The shift from norms of secrecy to appeals to public opinion at the level of communicative practice in mid-seventeenth-century England occurred before comparable democratic initiatives in other Western societies.¹² Moreover, these practical innovations provided precedents for democratic ideas in Leveller writings and, later, in writings by Locke and others toward the end of the century.¹³ Subsequently, these developments exercised great influence over reflection on politics in the French Enlightenment. Yet French philosophes warily regarded the English model of public opinion—unruly, relatively unconstrained by courtly manners—and preferred tamer, deferential discourse than that which flourished in a marketplace of ideas.¹⁴ Here, then, is yet another reason for not using formal writings from the French Enlightenment as a source for exploring the origins of the public sphere.

For the case of England, the turn from theology and philosophy to communicative practice leads to the following point of departure for a new account of the birth of the public sphere. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, English politics afforded little place for public opinion. Political communication existed but was severely restricted by norms of secrecy and privilege, confined mostly to discussion among local and national elites. In Parliament, a customary right of free speech in the fifteenth century had evolved into a formal privilege under the Tudors. But disclosure of parliamentary debates was a crime. Popular participation in political discourse was limited to the receiving end of symbolic displays of authority. Though conflict was endemic to politics, and followed fissures between and within national and local communities, no opposition, no parties, and no public space existed in which political factions competed in an open exchange of ideas. Yet by the end of the century, a privileged place for public opinion appears in liberal-democratic conceptions of political order, advanced by John Locke (1632–1704) and other Whig writers, such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83) and Algernon Sidney (1622–83). In examining the transition from communicative norms of secrecy and privilege to public opinion in English politics, we confront the practical origins of democratic culture: real-world communicative developments that made it possible for Locke and subsequent philosophers to uphold democratic conceptions of political order that presuppose the existence, rationality, and normative authority of public opinion.

At the core of democracy’s formal philosophies and institutional arrangements lies the elusive idea of public opinion. Assuring the authority of opinion and limiting its volatile excess are principal goals of democracy’s institutional arrangements, such the franchise and constitutional ground rules. Democratic governance is often associated with these visible arrangements, so much so that their development is often treated as coterminous with the history of democracy. Yet they are not the essence of the matter, for they presuppose the existence of free and open debate, a public sphere where political discourse derives from rival appeals to public opinion.¹⁵ Public opinion in modern democracy is a specific type of vox populi, one that arises out of a marketplace of ideas, whose authority for ultimately setting the political agenda derives from specific suppositions about the importance of consent, open debate, and rationality. That public opinion is in principle the prime mover of democratic politics is a commonplace observation. Yet unlike democracy’s institutional arrangements and constitutional rules, public opinion defies easy description and explanation.

Like the commodity famously described by Marx as abounding in metaphysical subtlety, public opinion is a complex thing. This complexity reflects the dual nature of public opinion as a real and nominal entity. Nominally it is a discursive fiction; qua public opinion it collectively exists only when instantiated in discourse, when invoked by a politician, pollster, journalist, or social scientist in support of a contention about what the public thinks or desires. At the same time, real individuals participate in political discourse, as readers, speakers, hearers, and writers. This underlies the paradox, noted fifty years ago by Herbert Blumer, that public opinion research led to many technical improvements in methods but did little to dispel uncertainly and confusion over what public opinion is. The same situation exists today, according to Noelle-Neumann.¹⁶ Compounding this complexity is the potential of the discursive fiction—public opinion invoked as a collective entity—to influence the opinion of individuals. One way to handle this complexity is an old convention in public opinion research: simplify matters with an operational definition that equates public opinion and the aggregation of individual opinions on public issues.¹⁷

Yet there is little novelty in the fact that today’s opinion polls are inscription devices that transform individual opinions into their nominal counterpart and, in the process and after, often alter the former.¹⁸ So were monster petition campaigns in the seventeenth century. Petitions and public opinion polls mediate between the real and nominal sides of public opinion.¹⁹ Public opinion has always had close links to political propaganda, and its expression was never independent of organizational and rhetorical properties of practices used to represent it. In practice, the public sphere falls short of its ghostly idealization in political theory: universal participation, rational discourse characterized by symmetry and reciprocity.²⁰ This has led several generations of critics, from Lippmann to Derrida and Bourdieu, to conclude that public opinion is a sham and the public sphere a conjuring trick, an ideological facade that conceals vast differences between reasoned debate and manipulation by spin doctors, between universal participation and limited access.²¹ Scrutiny of this pessimistic conclusion is a subsidiary goal of this book. We shall see that such pessimism—so central a feature in current theoretical writings on the public sphere—relies on grossly unbalanced assessments of communicative change, mostly pertaining to the novelty and implications of commerce and textual reproduction, for which the empirical analysis in this book lends little support.

In arriving at these conclusions, this study of the shift from secrecy to public opinion reverses the priority accorded to theoretical over practical developments in early democratic culture. Public opinion was a factor in English politics long before philosophers extolled the idea of a civil society where politics emerge from appeals to the reason of private persons. The invention of public opinion was a practical accomplishment, propelled by the economic and technical aspects of printing, respectively, its relentless commercialism and its potential for efficient reproduction of texts. This occurred in the mid-seventeenth-century revolution, when contending elites used the medium of print to appeal to a mass audience, and activist members of that audience invoked the authority of opinion to lobby those elites. Ambivalence and other contradictory responses greeted this development on all sides—Royalist and Parliamentarian, Presbyterian and Independent. Though innovative, the development arose as an unreflective practice. Hence, I use quotations to signify that the invention of public opinion was an innovation largely disclaimed by its practitioners, a not unusual development that I call the paradox of innovation. A key issue in this particular innovation is the relevance of communicative changes associated with printing, not only for the scope, but for the content of political discourse. The relevance of printing and the concomitant growth in popular literacy has, of course, been noted in prior accounts of the early public sphere. But in these accounts communicative change associated with printing is conceived far too narrowly, in terms of the scope of political communication: facilitating more rapid, extensive dissemination of novel ideas. That print culture itself was a source of novelty—a point explored by historians of printing—remains unexamined.

Another critical issue is the divergence of historical scholarship on early-modern England and theoretical work in other disciplines on the origins of the public sphere. Social scientists and philosophers who find these origins in capitalist development or Protestantism rely on historical perspectives that revisionist scholarship forced professional historians to abandon or at least severely question. Historical revisionism represents a sharp reversal of great expectations, admittedly shared by this writer, about an imminent instauration in one area of interdisciplinary scholarship, an impending merger of historical research and social science.

While historical issues and data have acquired growing importance in many areas of social science, historical research has at many points turned away from social science. Nowhere has this turn been sharper than in the field of early-modern British history, where more than Marxist and Whig perspectives on long-term change were casualties of revisionism. In its emphasis on historical particularity and ideographic representation of the past as the prime duty of historians, the revisionist revolt against generalization proscribes pursuit of all sociological themes. To pursue them in studying the seventeenth century, argue revisionists, is to belabor anachronism.²² Narrowing the gap between contemporary historical scholarship and theoretical reflection is a subsidiary methodological goal of this study. A viable compromise between hedgehogs and foxes must occupy a middle ground between revisionist historiography, with its (unsustainable) goal to return to the sources free of preconceptions,²³ and sweeping theories of the public sphere that simply cannot be squared with individual-level observations offered by meticulous, revisionist scholarship. Revisionism is not unassailable. The birth of a public sphere in seventeenth-century England had antecedents, being neither an accident nor a product of elite maneuvers that emanated from idiosyncratic personalities and the problematic finances of the English ruling classes. We will not understand the origins of democracy’s public sphere unless we can establish its links to long- and short-term changes in communicative media and practices, and place them in the wider context of social change in early-modern Europe. Yet this scholarly project just as much requires that we reject sweeping, insupportable explanations that emulate the hedgehog’s use of concepts.

After reviewing these theoretical and historiographic issues in chapter 2, I begin in chapter 3 with traditional principles for communicative practice in English politics. In principle, political communication followed norms of secrecy and privilege that grew out of fundamental, un-controverted assumptions about the nature of the political and social order. In practice, however, we shall see in chapters 4 and 5 that political messages traveled in all directions and took many forms in England. Long before the tumultuous events of the mid-seventeenth century, messages routinely circulated in oral reports and rumors, ballads, private correspondence, proclamation by herald and broadside, the posted libel, petitions, ritualized forms of restive behavior, political sermons, speeches by assize judges, scribal texts, printed propaganda, and other ways. At the same time, conventions governing political communication imposed strict limits on its exercise. Contradictions between principle and practice were numerous, for when contemporaries thought about political communication, they often overlooked that which was widespread in practice. Many licit channels of communication conveyed messages between the center and periphery of the political nation. At the same time, illicit but widely used channels conducted reports of news, the topic of chapter 5. Thus, political communication in prerevolutionary England exhibits great variation in terms of modes of transmission—oral, scribal, print—rhetorical conventions, licit or illicit status, and popular access. In general, an inverse relationship existed between access and substantive content of political discourse: access was greatest for purely symbolic displays of sovereign authority, least so for modes of communication that featured substantive discussions and debates.

These practices and their uneven relationship to norms of secrecy and privilege in political communication are the essential point of departure for studying the invention of public opinion. Due acknowledgment must be given to the range and complexity of traditional communicative practices in political discourse if we are to avoid substituting one set of sweeping generalizations with another. Claims about printing as the fountainhead of democracy rely on an untenable reductionism that hedgehogs would find congenial. The relevance of printing for the public sphere emerges in specific rhetorical and social contexts; it is not an inevitable consequence of print logic.²⁴ Change in the scope and content of political communication flowed from the impact of printing on traditional communicative practices, such as scribal communication of news and petitioning. The invention of public opinion was not, then, an automatic consequence of print technology. Print culture, and not the Enlightenment, is a plausible candidate as the prototype for open debate in civil society. But this claim requires qualification, a balanced assessment that distinguishes between what was and was not unique in printing and print culture, between changes in quantity—where printing accentuated developments present in scribal modes of reproduction—and quality. For example, the coffeehouse culture in Restoration England, which Habermas specifically associates with the embryonic public sphere, relied for critical, accurate political news mainly on scribal modes of publication for political texts. It is therefore in the sphere of inscription—the printed pamphlet and the scribal separate—rather than that of voice that we should be looking for the architecture of the public sphere.²⁵ That print and scribal publication were intertwined in complex ways should prompt additional care not to overemphasize the unmediated causal significance of printing for the public sphere.

Exploring print culture as a prototype for a political public sphere is the task of chapter 6. After it appeared in England, printing was quickly pressed into government service. Its technical superiority for textual reproduction commended it to English bishops who, otherwise wary of its implications for religion, created printed tax forms that helped them discharge their duty to collect annates, firstfruits, and other clerical taxes that, after the Reformation, flowed to Westminster and not Rome. At this time, printing was routinely used to publish royal proclamations. It was also used to publish statutes enacted in Parliament, especially in the important sense that they could be alleged in court without special pleading (which involved the production of a certified true copy), and propaganda from Thomas Cromwell and his stable of writers who promoted religious policies of Henry VIII.²⁶ My reconstruction of links between printing and the public sphere begins with technical and social aspects of printing, and then moves on to the ensuing print culture, whose principal attributes—publicity, crass commercialism, evasion of censorship, popular readership—appear in literary and religious publications. In both the late-Elizabethan literary world and in religious debates occurring between Puritans, Separatists, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, we find the same, distinctive attributes of print culture. In chapter 7 we encounter these same attributes in the political literature of the English Revolution.

Central to print culture is an alliance between commerce and controversy, forged by the interest of authors and stationers in producing texts for which popular demand exists. But, as noted above, printing’s relevance for the birth of the public sphere goes beyond change in the scope and extends to the content of political communication. Competition among stationers is important for explaining changes in scope, when a flood of cheap texts and simple prose enlarged popular access to political debates and discussion. For explaining changes in the content of political communication, the heightened capacity of printing, relative to scribal culture, for reproducing texts is crucial for understanding how political discourse became oriented to the constitution and invocation of public opinion. The rise of a public sphere facilitated by printing is, then, a complex development because it encompasses public opinion as both a real and nominal factor in politics. Political texts claim the mantle of opinion to legitimate a legislative agenda. At the same time they thereby influence opinions of readers and open up possibilities for them to acquire knowledge, make judgments, and, when the printed text was a petition or announcement of a meeting, participate in activities intended to lobby legislators. In chapter 7 I analyze this alteration in the content of communication in terms of printing’s imposition of dialogic order on conflict. Printing’s technical capacity to reproduce texts led to the production of broadsides and pamphlets that referred to other texts, often accompanied by partial and, less often, full reproduction of referenced texts. Readers thus confronted political texts that responded to prior texts, simultaneously referring to, excerpting from, and commenting on them. Though these texts prompted readers to arrive at correct conclusions, they derived rhetorical force from the presupposition that they reliably reproduced prior texts in order to appeal to the judgment of the reader. We shall see evidence of printing’s imposition of dialogic order on political conflict in many categories of printed texts: pamphlets, newspapers, and petitions.

Once again, however, caveats are important. Scribal publication, too, had the potential to impose dialogic order on political conflict. In chapter 5 I present evidence of this from political accounts in diaries and commonplace books compiled in large measure by copies or summaries of manuscript copies of political texts. Private copying of texts was central to scribal modes of transmission for informal circulation of domestic news, which occurred in overlapping channels of oral and scribal communication. Copying became less necessary when printed domestic news became temporarily available, after 1640, when the Long Parliament disabled prerogative courts that had enforced censorship and commercial, serialized newspapers competed for readers. But during and after this development, rumors, ballads, private letters, and formal newsletters remained important vehicles for the informal circulation of political news and commentary. Thus, a balanced assessment of printing’s impact on domestic news must accord equal importance to change and continuity in the transition from oral and scribal communication to textual transmission via printing. Production of printed texts of news was a quantitative extension of what was possible under scribal modes of transmission.

Petitions present a different story. Much of the evidence for the invention of public opinion in chapter 7 derives from inferences about the motives of writers and the political elites who subsidized their work in composing pamphlets and newspapers. Chapter 8 presents evidence on communicative developments outside the charmed inner circle of politics. After all, a democratic model of the public sphere presumes that political communication occurs in the political periphery, among ordinary members of civil society, and that a goal of their discussions and debates is to influence the decisions at the political center. Hence, petitions are crucial for understanding how printing facilitated the invention of public opinion. The impact of printing on petitions, unlike the transmission of news, led to change that was qualitative in nature, to abrupt discontinuities with traditional conventions that governed the venerable medieval device for registering grievances. Omission of this development is a critical flaw in prior accounts of the public sphere because petitioning in mid-seventeenth-century English politics provides an unparalleled empirical site for exploring how, long before the Enlightenment, public opinion began to mediate between the state and civil society. Petitions were not the only vehicle for political messages between the center and periphery; sermons, newspapers, and pamphlets, as well as official ordinances, proclamations, and declarations were also important. But petitions are an especially important source of evidence for studying the early public sphere because they are both a cause and indicator of other causes, such as printing and print culture.

Petitioning was a medieval communicative practice with rules concerning form and content. It was a privilege (in the medieval sense) that exempted petitioners from secrecy norms that otherwise prohibited popular discussion of political matters. The traditional petition referred local grievances to central authority; yet it did not load its message with normative claims about the will of the people. Rules for petitions coexisted with more general norms of secrecy and privilege in political communication. During the English Revolution, new uses for printed petitions, as devices that invoked public opinion in order to lobby elites and influence the views of persons outside Parliament, provided the means by which appeals to public opinion broke through barriers of secrecy and privilege in political communication. Confronted by the problem of competition between petitions that advanced contrary opinions, some contemporaries upheld consent, reason, and representation as criteria of the validity of opinions invoked in public debate. Change in petitioning was, then, a practical precedent for people’s public use of their reason,²⁷ a political development that Habermas and many other commentators assign to elite actors in the eighteenth century.

This practical precedent also led to new ideas. Some petitioners came to see the need for formal constitutional arrangements that would enforce the authority of public opinion. Innovation in petitioning thus fueled novel claims for the authority of opinion in petitions. Petitions came from associations of private persons, whereas tradition dictated that petitions on public issues be initiated by local elites in the name of corporate entities, for example, counties, guilds, and municipalities. Thus, another consequence of innovation in the practice of petitioning is the birth of the party. Yet ambivalence bordering on denial best describes contemporary responses to innovative petitioning. Traditional rhetorical features of petitions provided a resource for denials of innovation. The same petition could be defended by supporters as a deferential, juridical, and spontaneous expression of grievance—the rhetorical form that depoliticized grievance in traditional petitions—and attacked by critics who made visible organizational practices that contradicted apolitical appearances. Yet more than illogic or expediency underlies these reactions; they exhibit a pattern, shaped by communicative practices that have evolved in advance of supportive theoretical formulations.

In the epilogue, I tackle two themes. One concerns the aftermath of the English Revolution. My thesis that practical innovations in political communication preceded and prepared the way for democratic political philosophy leads to the following question: What is the relationship between events in the middle of the seventeenth century—for example, change in communicative practice and the politics of turmoil that led from civil wars, regicide, and creation to a republic to the Restoration in 1660—and the appearance of democratic conceptions of politics toward the end of that century? I argue that several developments after the Restoration prepared the way for liberal-democratic philosophies that put public opinion at the core of politics. The rise of toleration and natural religion, along with growing confidence in natural science as a means for overcoming religious differences, facilitated formulation of liberal-democratic philosophies by Locke, the earl of Shaftesbury, Algernon Sidney, and other Whig writers. During the English Revolution, a severely pessimistic appraisal of human nature in Puritan and sectarian religion was a principal reason for reluctance by political opponents of the Stuart monarchy to acknowledge innovative claims about subjecting politics to public opinion. The rise of natural religion in Restoration England overcame this obstacle because it allowed contemporaries to begin to untangle religion and politics even as they upheld the old precept that any adequate doctrine on political authority must encompass religion. In elevating reason over revelation, Whig writers, unlike their Puritan predecessors, were not obligated to assign divinely privileged status to any narrowly defined model of government. Locke and other writers could take definitive steps toward embracing the authority of opinion in politics because their religious commitments, though nominally Protestant, upheld an optimistic appraisal of human nature that did not preclude the priority of tolerance over revelation as a precondition for the pluralist pursuit of utility.

Finally, after jumping from the middle to the end of the seventeenth century, we leap to the present. The last theme pursued in the concluding chapter explores implications of this study for theoretical reflection on the contemporary public sphere. Debates over the current status and future of the public sphere often turn on accounts of its origins, which, we shall see, are not well anchored in empirical evidence on communicative developments in the early-modern era. Instead, these accounts rely on idealized descriptions of critical uses of public reason, often derived from self-promoting representations by eighteenth-century philosophers who celebrated their kingdom of reason. In critical theory and postmodernism, excessive pessimism on the modern public sphere is fueled by grossly unbalanced assessments of communicative change that attribute novelty in our era to rapid growth in commercialism and the capacity to reproduce texts. How, then, should we assess hypercritical perspectives on the public sphere in modern democracy that cite commerce and textual reproduction in media culture in order to explain why reasoned debate in public is now, if not extinct, an endangered species? Not only do these critiques wrongly attribute novelty to commercialism and textual reproduction in our era; they miss their constitutive role in the origins of reasoned appeals to public opinion in politics. That modernist accomplishment sprang precisely from those communicative developments that critical theorists and postmodernists hold responsible for the contemporary dissipation of reason. Empirical findings in this book flatly contradict this premise and militate against the pessimism that flows from it.

1 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston, 1965); Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York, 1964); Talcott Parsons, The Evolution of Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1977).

2 Jeffrey Alexander, ed., Real Civil Societies (London, 1998); Craig Calhoun, Nationalism and Civil Society, in C. Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford, 1994); Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1992); John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society (Oxford, 1995); Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society (Cambridge, 1998); Adam Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York, 1992).

3 Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, [1962] 1989). More recently, see Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 299.

4 On this development, see Lynn Hunt, Introduction: History, Culture, and Text, in L. Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 1–22.

5 E.g., Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin, eds., Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 1987); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC, 1991); Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham, NC, 1990); Jeffrey Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early-Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1990); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, 1990).

6 For developments up to 1660, see Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers (London, 1983); Cyndia S. Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997); A. D. T. Cromartie, The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches, November 1640–July 1642, HJ 33 (1990); Richard Cust, News and Politics in Early-Seventeenth-Century England, P&P 112 (1986); Sheila Lambert, The Beginning of Printing for the House of Commons, 1640–1642 Library, 6th ser., 3 (1981); Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996). For after the Restoration up to 1700, see, G. C. Gibbs, Press and Public Opinion, in J. R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688 (Stanford, 1992); James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge, 1986); Harold M. Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington, KY, 1996).

7 E.g., Ronald Jacobs, Civil Society and Crisis, AJS 101 (1996): 1238–72.

8 In addition to items in notes 2 and 3 above, see Leon Mayhew, In Defense of Modernity, AJS 89 (1984): 1281–87; Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion—Our Social Skin (Chicago, 1993), pp. 69–87.

9 In addition to items in notes 2 and 3 above, see Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People? Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley, 1978); Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse (Cambridge, MA, 1989).

10 For an earlier version of this thesis, see David Zaret Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres of Seventeenth-Century England, in C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 221–34.

11 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 57; and see Bendix, Kings or People? pp. 10, 12–13, 266–69; Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 86–87; T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Development (New York, 1964), pp. 70–71.

12 Sawyer’s analysis of propaganda and factional conflict in France between 1614 and 1617 shows that pamphlets were designed to influence the perceptions and manipulate the behavior of an audience. Printed Poison, p. 11. But democratic models of the public sphere involve more than flows of information from the center to the periphery of the nation. Efforts to mobilize and invoke opinion in order to lobby political elites is crucial. This reservation also applies to descriptions of a public sphere in sixteenth-century England. See Clegg, Censorship in Elizabethan England, p. 222; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print (Cambridge, 1997), chap. 5.

13 This formulation of the relationship between the Levellers and Locke may meet objections advanced by G. E. Aylmer, Locke no Leveller, in I. Gentles, J. Morrill, and B. Worden, eds., Soldiers, Writers, and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 304–22.

14 Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Stanford, 1990), pp. 173–78; Mona Ozouf, ‘Public Opinion’ at the End of the Old Regime, in T. C. W. Blanning, ed., The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution (Chicago, 1996), pp. 93–94.

15 See Alain Touraine, What Is Democracy? (New York, 1997), pp. 12–15.

16 Herbert Blumer, Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling, ASR 13 (1948): 542–43; Noelle-Neumann, Spiral of Silence, p. 58.

17 Floyd Allport, Toward a Science of Public Opinion, Public Opinion Quarterly (1937): 23. See also Kimball Young, Comments on the Nature of ‘Public’ and ‘Public Opinion,’ International Journal of Opinion and Attitude Research 2 (1948): 387.

18 See Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago, 1993), pp. 44–45 and passim.

19 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge, 1997), p. 173.

20 E.g., Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 362.

21 Bruce Robbins, Introduction, in B. Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993), p. viii; and see Pierre Bourdieu, The Public Sphere Does Not Exist, in A. Mattelart and S. Siegelaub, Communication and Class Struggle (New York, 1979); Jacques Derrida, La Démocratie Ajournée, in L’Autre Cap (Paris, 1991), p. 103; Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York, 1922); Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York, 1927).

22 J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), p. 23.

23 Kevin Sharpe, ‘Revisionism’ Revisited, in Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (London, 1985), p. x; and see Conrad